• Today's Word

Insular

🔊 Listen to the word Insular

IN-syoo-ler

Definition

(adjective) Characterized by a narrow-minded focus on one’s own group or environment; closed off to outside ideas or perspectives.

Example

The company’s insular culture — promoting only from within, dismissing outside perspectives, and treating change as a threat — had quietly calcified into the biggest obstacle to its own growth.

Word Origin

Insular derives from the Latin insularis, meaning “of an island,” from insula — “island.” It entered English in the 17th century with its literal meaning of relating to islands before quickly acquiring its figurative sense of the psychological condition associated with island life — a worldview bounded by water on all sides, self-contained, and instinctively resistant to what lies beyond the shoreline. The British, as an island nation, have had a complicated relationship with the word ever since.

Fun Fact

Japan’s history offers perhaps the world’s most dramatic example of deliberate insularity in action. During the Edo period from 1603 to 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate enforced a policy of sakoku — literally “chained country” — that banned Japanese citizens from leaving Japan on pain of death and restricted foreign trade to a single Dutch outpost on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. The policy held for over two centuries, producing one of history’s most culturally distinct and internally sophisticated civilizations — and one of its most spectacular collisions with the outside world when American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his black ships in 1853 and ended the isolation almost overnight.